The next revolution was sang by Teddy Afro and directed by Tamirat Mekonen; this weekend, 65 of our people wrote a revolution on the back of Busboys and Poet napkins::
by Teddy Fikre dated: Tuesday, June 19th, 2012
Black. It is a color often disabused. It is a hue seldom given credit. For too long, black has been seen as a curse. Even by her own people, black has been a color of death and a the perfection of misery. Black has been given a bad rap, instead of being treated as royalty, black has been abused as the color of disease. This pernicious disease of the mind; we live in a world where black is prostituted as the essence of debauchery while other colors are praised as the hue of God’s perfection. But black is the mother of all colors and the children of all hues, without black there can be no white, black is what you get when you fuse the colors of the rainbow. Black is perfect. Black is me.
It is for this reason that I am in awe of Teddy Afro’s “Tikur Sew” music video. Most don’t understand it yet, but what Teddy Afro is singing about is not merely a retelling of Adwa, Teddy Afro is chanting the melody of a black revolution. Never in my lifetime did I think I would witness a sea of Ethiopians in a soccer stadium—30,000 strong—singing “Tikur Sew” and being proud to say “I am black”. Yet, one song by Teddy Afro and a corresponding video by Tamirat Mekonen has revolutionized black and now we stand in awe and love our blackness. This is the happiest moment of my life because black has been raised from poverty to prosperity. Teddy Afro repainted the canvass of the world with tikur and managed to burn into the psyche of Ethiopians and black people as a whole the true beauty of black.
Nearly 60 years ago, Thurgood Marshall changed the glide path of humanity when he had the audacity to challenge the mendacity of “Seperate but Equal”. The most powerful means he turned to when he challenged this pernicious law was a study his team conducted of the evils of racism. They turned to black children less than 10 years old and gave them two dolls. One doll was white and the other was black; all the black children immediately gravitated to the white dolls while they abused the black dolls. The depravity of bigotry was engrained in the minds of these black children that the color black represented all the ills of the world while white was the personification of good. The irony of all ironies was that these children were fed into their spirits the negative light of black by their very own parents. When I say that racism only exists because it is espoused and propagated by black folk I don’t say it out of hyperbole—the biggest obstacles in the way of black folk are black folk themselves. The Klu Klux Klan has nothing on rappers like Soulja Boy and gangster rappers when it comes to 
destroying black hope.
Now you know why Teddy Afro’s Tikur Sew is all powerful. Teddy Afro has become out Thurgood Marshall, he is dispelling the idea that black is evil from the mind of our children. I hope in due time we will stop wearing black to funerals and only wear black to our celebrations. In due time, we will stop referring to dark skinned Ethiopians as “koolies” and accept them as the closest thing to the color of God. In due time, we will not be repulsed as a people when the winner of Miss Ethiopia is from Gambella and accept her as the truest sense of Ethiopianism. This is a revolution my friends, one fired without a single bullet and started with eskista instead of dead bodies piling up in Bole and beyond.
It was for this reason that I organized “I am Tikur” event at Busboys and Poets this weekend. I had a vision of retelling Tikur and showing to the world that black is beautiful and that we should be proud to say we are black. Even though I got endless emails and text messages saying “I am not black, we are special”, for the most part the vast majority of the responses I received were positive. My people, children of Ethiopia old and young alike, started to change their Facebook status updates with “I am Tikur” and made the “I am Tikur” poster their profile pictures. Endless tweets were sent with #IamTikur and by the time the event at Busboys and Poets launched, a sea of our people and others who love our mother Ethiopia came out to celebrate our… continued…
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HAPPENIN Circle
I am Eskista ~ 07:14:12
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HEBRET (unity). Please post this article on your Facebook wall with a status update “I am TIkUR” and send out multiple tweets on twitter by embedding this article URL and use #IamTikur Let’s make #IamTikur (I am black) a trending tweet today. YICHALAL!
10 thoughts on “Tikur Retold”
It seems that you are staring at one sigle point and that staring of your’s is conveniently glued with a strong magic glue to that chosen point. You have chosen to be a one dimensional preacher in a multidimensional world.
For your information different colors carry different meanings in different cultures in the same way that different rulers carry different meanings even within the same country.
For example White color is a symbol of death and distruction in many Asian cultures. Even among some significant Ethiopian cultural groups White (Adi) is some monister with which parents frighten unruly children to behave themselves.
And then again, the black man King Menelik is a hero for some Ethiopian ethnic groups but a bandit robber genocidal tyrant for the majority.
In the end, the whole issue is about wealth and ownership of property as opposed to lack of ownership and poverty.
If you organize, invade, conquare and amass huge amounts of wealth like the colonial (whether internal or external) periods and post colonial neocolonial times by reducing others to wretchedness and poverty, be sure that the wealthy side will be worship, danced for, praised, and served to the end while the robbed poor and all of its symbols and colours will be redicules and dispised.
The values and definitions of what is the best and what is the worst both at the objective and subjects levels is not static but chnaging and dynamic over time. During the classical civilizations of the early Kush and Egypt of the Pharaoes where the first medical sciences, architectural designs, mineral extraction techniques, anatomical human body drawings, etc. were invented the Egyptians were not only admired objectively and subjectively but worshed as Gods both in Egypt, greece by the Romans and other countries, nations and cultures of the time.
Slowly but surely civilization moved east along with migrating people and then to Greece again with migrating people and then moved to several western countries again with migrants. Colours followed moving together with civilizations and innovations. And now again, civilizations, innovations and the accompanying accumulation of wealth seems to be shifting to the Eastern countries like China who have just sent a female astronaut to space and expect to own both the planet Earth and the outside space.
By then I am sure you will stop your fixed non stop crying concerning your trauma of black inferiority and white supriority swan songs just when you notice the fact that the coming superior color is now neither white nor black but the color that is in beween and pulling rags from under your shivering feet.
They are already grabbing vergin fertile green farm lands (GREEN GOLD) from under the feet the 85 million starving Ethiopians even with out being White and facing your attention diversion whining strategies.
Anonymous replies:
June 20th, 2012 at 7:09 PM
Lemlem,
the black man King Menelik is a hero for some Ethiopian ethnic groups but a bandit robber genocidal tyrant for the majority.
I think you got the facts backward here. Minilik(emye minilik) the a hero for majority if not to all Ethiopians. if it wasn’t for his heroic leadership, you wouldn’t be making this comment to today.
Minilik left us a country that we love and adore today. otherwise you and i would have been known to belong to a country once colonized by white power. It amazes me to hear people like you putting down our heros who made us who we are today. Ethiopia is Ethiopia becuase of minilik, ase yohannes, ase tewdros….etc.
mot lewoyane and jelewochu!!
vague replies:
June 21st, 2012 at 12:32 PM
Lemlem, I don’t have anything to say but you’re spot on!
Darkness is in the mind. not the skin color. the darkest people i have meat in the world are not dark skinned at all but they all have used color to do there dirty work.to kill,to enslave,to still and some time to wipe-out a civilization in the name of color.
color by it self it it is not a problem at all.all colors are beauty full.the problem is how we used color to decrement one another.don’t get in that trap.
Teddy thank you for the writing which rises above the common and boring petty prejudice
I have seen a reciprocal on face book by some ethiopians a picture that says thanks god i am not tikur ( i am habesha). This is exactly the Abyssinian concept of a ‘different identity’ which is centered around people with a semitic stock, named habesha but in essence is a denial of what one termed as the “half-nigger part” of the hebesha. Interestingly and in refernce to this the arabs dismiss tghe habesha as the other version of “niggers” The present map of ethiopia is a far cry from the i am not tikur abysinian cutlural compartment. Therfore, I am tikur tries to define ethiopia as a lrager domain and part of black africa, while the am not tikur tries to subsciber to the self defined supoerficial racial identitiy made in denial of the half blackness. For the present ethiopia this term of i am not tikur appears racist to some ethiopians and a little backward since afterall is not defined by skin colour but rather by gewography. In ethiopia there are people from very light skin to deep dark skin and ethiopia is a spectrum of many colours and nationalities. This diversity is the asset on which the EPRDF banks heavily on. Most of the ethiopian opposition politics is built on the monolithic ethiopian identitiy as predominatly habesha which the others are at best inconsequential and what professor tecola hagos has once described as peripherals or as far as ethiopia is taken can be considered “non-existent”. This semi-barbaric sentiment of alieneating once own citizen some times with exteremely derogatory reference has acquired in modern times continental dimensions. Most the sub saharan africans are referred to as barias or baroch by those ethiopians who view themselves as difefrent and habeshas and those africans know too well the deep seated prejudice the hebshas have for them. Mixed with this is the reverence and adoration of the white skin and whiteness and the cursing of the black identitiy. There are theories that claim habeshas are white people or descendants of this race or that race but basically white. This flat self-denial is bizarre to the main stream white to whom habesha has nothing whirte in it excpet being one other diffrent nigger race ( to use the white mans reference). All in all the concept of i am not tikur is challenges the very fabric of ethiopia and reasserts the colonial style sentiment of the northern habesha rulers culture and the southeward forced expnasion that resulted in the present day ethiopia. In this context, it is not surprising that oromos, somalis, sodamas, gambellas, etc take extreme polar position in opposition to the assult on their identitity whihc basicall is labelled as uncertidied to be ethiopian if ethiopia is narrowly defined in this way. The ethnic and nationalist consciousness is a fire politics that evolved in due time and in this way poerhaps the word ethiopia is no longer a dominant factor as ethnic identitiy is thereatened with survival and ethiopia is quite expendable. faced with polarity and extremisim an oromo will die to be an oromo because being an ethiopian is exactly equated with sub-human like defintiion of not being an oromo. The word ethiopia is now entagled in tug of war with non-dying barbarism, adefintion that tries to kill the geo-political reality fo the present day ethiopia. With the narrow defintion of ethiopianness as a colour domain ethiopia as a country can be questioned for its true exsitence left right south and north. And that is woth a question to ask for a defintive answer has to be found as it is a querstion that defined survival of many ethnic nationbalities rambly assembled under Minilk’s gun.
I hesitated to comment on this. But I fail to see what is going on here. What is Teddy Fikre trying to tell us? Does he doubt he is black ? or he just recently found out he is black? Or Teddy Afro told him what he is and he is just now finding out? Hasnt black been beautiful since 1960s? What is Teddy Fikre talking about 50 years after the fact?
I know and see a lot of Teddy Fikres since I have been to the US. They never get tired of saying the same thing again and again. It is as if by being “black” they are somehow superior to the rest. You get the feeling that they discovered they are black because it gives them benefits. Get rid of those benefits, they will be the very first people who conspire against black people praising themselves as the number one people of habesha.
You see, it is all a matter of cost benefit analysis in the end. Teddy Fikre has no problem calling “Habesha” assholes and Miqegna. That is because there is nothing to lose, no employer to deny him dollars, no restaurant to deny him food, nothing. He would do the same thing to other blacks, when and if the situation reverses.
You people have stumped from understanding your essence. But now I think I have the key to deciphering your whole psyche.
Menielik was a king of all Ethiopins ,one commentor describes him as a “bandit robber …” she sounds like a Tplf/Shabia. This has been their method to dovide and now rule Ethiopia ,for her information he united E
Teddy Fikre is simply like the uncivilized, uneducated and inferior white neo Nazi red necks who are walking around and shouting “WHITE POWER!” Just two sides of the same coin. He has just undergone some sort of self awareness by reading Malcolm X. Fast paced social change ongoing identity defition is hard on people, especially those with nominal self awareness.
When there is nothing left to boast about and feel good about oneself, one starts to sell the colour which nature donated to him for free and for a reason. One shouldn’t Teddy Fikre dress a highly visible BADGE reading ” I AM TIKUR!” and go to rant at all of those lumpen guys shouting “White power!” and leave us alone.
Is it a white man who is dehumanizing 85 million black Ethiopian and exposing them to constant starvation?
Minilk is a warlord who killed million of innocent people in the southern Ethiopia. He pionnered slave trade. He made his country men an object using the weapon sold to him by European. He got the money to buy a weapon by selling slaves.
If you praise Minilk, the worest dictator of his time, don’t get mad if someone from Tigray start to sing about how Melese Zenawi is a saint for starting federalism and saved the unity at least for few years.
Shame on you Teddy
@damn
Heat is a slavery by it self.so don’t let your heat make you a slave.in other word emancipet your self from whatever mental slavery we put our self trough.so let us free our self from our self so we can free Ethiopia for all us.